Please Understand Me
Good day. Mirëdita. نهارك سعيد добър ден. Dobar dan. Goddag. Goedendag. Hyvää päivää Bonjour. Guten Tag. Καλημέρα. jó napot. góðan daginn. Buon giorno. Labdien. добар ден. Dzień dobry. Bom dia. Bună ziua. Buenos días. God dag. こんにちは. 안녕하세요. สวัสดี. xin chào buổi ngày.
For the past 6 past months I’ve been working in the Immersive Design Center at Raytheon Missile Systems designing in the world of stereoscopic three dimensions. We’ve been working in this environment across the North American continent passing our virtual designs back and forth between New Hampshire and Tucson; two very different parts of the country with two different cultures. We’ve also been conversing across telephone, desktop and video teleconferencing, sharing desktops; sharing files. So many ways to communicate, to refine our work, gain consensus, and converge on a focal point. But why have so many ways to share ideas and communicate? As RMS expands into global markets, our hope is that by providing visual clues (both two, three and higher dimensions) we can improve our communication and thus our relationships with our customers and the quality of our products. But communication is hard. It takes one conversation at a time. Not only do we face language barriers; there are cultural, gestural, and social barriers.
English is my second language. I learned it at age 6 watching television with my friend Leticia. My mother used to say, “Watch carefully how your teacher uses her lips to speak, so that you can sound like her.” It took a long time and reading was even more difficult but now I can barely speak my mother’s language, Portuguese, and I miss it. I think a lot about how I speak and always have had to focus on the words. I get much coaching around the way I talk and the usage of certain words; in particular, those words that people have called “self referential.” Still I didn’t understand the problem. Why is it improper to use the word, “my?” Well today, it hit me. I finally realized why sometimes I’m misunderstood. On my way home from work, I called my mom and we talked about it. I went online and to my books and started to look up my theory:
There are gender differences in language.
When I use the word “my”, as in “my team”, “my family”, “my country”… I use that word to represent membership, or belonging while working in a man’s world where “my” probably represents ownership.
So, I looked up the word in the dictionary. This is what I found:
my plural of my (Adjective)
Adjective
|
Turns out there are others who have studied gender differences in language. This article by Nemati and Bayer (2007) cites, “From childhood males and females are different in many ways, both physiologically and psychologically.” There are also social differences between men and women. Two of the most significant theories on social differences between males and females are “difference theory” and “dominance theory”.
According to the “difference theory” men and women, even those within the same group, live in different or separate cultural worlds and, as a result, they promote different ways of speaking (Uchida, 1992). This theory is sometimes called “two-culture theory”. In simple terms, although men and women live in the same environment they establish different relations with society as if each belonged to a different environment and culture, the result of which is consequently reflected in the language of both genders as in other aspects of their lives. So in this theory, cross-gender communication is to be taken as cross-cultural or bi-cultural communication.
In “dominance theory”, men and women are believed to inhabit a cultural and linguistic world, where power and status are unequally distributed. In this theory, also called power-based theory, the focus is on male dominance and gender division.” There is evidence that although men and women might come from the same social class or culture and thus to the same speech community, they may use different linguistic forms. In fact, the linguistic forms used by women and men contrast to some extent in all speech communities. It was even found, Holmes (1993), in one culture of Amazonian Indians that the language difference is so extreme, males and females speak different languages. In other areas, the variation is just in linguistic features. For example, in Portuguese you would say “obrigada” – thank you (female) if you are female and “obrigado” (male) if you are male.
Looking into this further, we discover that women tend to use the standard language more than men do and one researcher, Climate (1997), believes that females generally use speech to develop and maintain relationships. They use language to achieve intimacy. Tannen (1990) states that women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy, while men speak and hear a language of status and independence.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in linguistic studies and gender differences, which has only been a field of study in the past century. When you think of it, many things have changed for women in the past century and some have not. There’s still a pay gap for women; the older the woman, the bigger the gap. Career-minded women still have to make the hard choice of raising children or advancing your career. Women make up 51% of the population but still live under male law, governed by an 80% male house of representative and 75% male senate. But…
Just this year, Tammy Baldwin made history as she became the first openly gay female politician elected to the U.S. Senate, joining the largest female representation in history. President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, amending the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Mae Jemison becomes the first woman of color to go into space in 1992. In 1981, Sandra Day O'Connor becomes the first woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Anna Mae McCabe Hays becomes the first woman general in the U.S. Army in 1970. 1961, President John F. Kennedy establishes the President's Commission on the Status of Women. 1955, Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1942, the Women's Auxiliary Flying Squadron (WAFS) is formed. Amelia Earhart's solo Atlantic flight was in 1932. And only in 1920, did The 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution give women the right to vote.
In January 2013, women will make up 22% of the workforce at RMS. The range varies greatly though depending upon the domain. For Engineering, women often stand out as an obvious minority. Male speak is everywhere.
Once after five weeks in Brazil, I started thinking in Portuguese again, dreaming in it. I still focused on my words carefully, how I sounded – not too ‘American’ – and how to put a sentence together but I actually longed to hear English again, similarly at work, I long to speak ‘woman’ and be understood. Perhaps, I’ll be a stranger in any language and secretly long for the quiet at home. At least now I know why my speech is misunderstood at work. So, if you hear a woman refer to ‘their team’ or ‘their program’ or ‘their department’, perhaps you might interpret it in a more generous manner: that woman feels like they belong in your man’s world.
Adeus. Adios. Goodbye. Tchau e boa noite.
